While Nadia controlled her impatience as best she could, Stevens manipulated the bulbs and pipettes of the gas apparatus.
"Pressure, fifty-two centimeters—more than I dared hope for—and analysis all x, I believe. Oxygen concentration a little high, but not much."
"We won't have to wear the space-suits, then?"
"Not unless I missed something in the analysis. The pressure corresponds to our own at a height of about three thousand meters, which we can get used to without too much trouble. Good thing, too. I brought along all the air I could get hold of, but as I told you back there, if we had to depend on it altogether, we might be out of luck. I'm going to pump some of our air back into a cylinder to equalize our pressure—don't want to waste any of it until we're sure the outside air suits us without treatment."
When the pressure inside had been gradually reduced to that outside and they had become accustomed to breathing the rarefied medium, Stevens opened the airlock and the outside doors, and for some time cautiously sniffed the atmosphere of the satellite. He could detect nothing harmful or unusual in it—it was apparently the same as earthly air—and he became jubilant.
"All x, Nadia—luck is perched right on our banner. Freedom, air, water, power, and coal! Now as you suggested, we'll go places and do things!"
"Suppose it's safe?" Her first eagerness to explore their surroundings had abated noticeably. "You aren't armed, are you?"
"No, and I don't believe that there was a gun of any kind aboard the Arcturus. That kind of thing went out quite a while ago, you know. We'll take a look, anyway—we've got to find out about that coal before we decide to settle down here. Remember this half-gravity stuff, and control your leg-muscles accordingly."
Leaping lightly to the ground, they saw that the severed section of fifty-inch armor, which was the rim of their conveyance, almost blocked the entrance to the narrow canyon which they had selected for their retreat. Upon one side that wall of steel actually touched the almost perpendicular wall or rock; upon the other side there was left only a narrow passage. They stepped through it, so that they could see the waterfall and the gorge, and stopped silent. The sun, now fairly high, was in no sense the familiar orb of day, but was a pale, insipid thing, only one-fifth the diameter of the sun to which they were accustomed, and which could almost be studied with the unshielded eye. From their feet a grassy meadow a few hundred feet wide sloped gently down to the river, from whose farther bank a precipice sprang upward for perhaps a thousand feet—merging into towering hills whose rugged grandeur was reminiscent of the topography of the moon. At their backs the wall of the gorge was steep, but not precipitous, and was covered with shrubs and trees—some of which leaned out over the little canyon, completely screening it, and among whose branches birds could now and then be seen flitting about. In that direction no mountains were visible, indicating that upon their side of the river there was an upland plateau or bench. To their right the river, the gorge, and the strip of meadow extended for a mile or more, then curved away and were lost to sight. To their left, almost too close for comfort, was the stupendous cataract, towering above them to a terror-inspiring height. Nadia studied it with awe, which changed to puzzled wonder.
"What's the matter with it, Steve? It looks like a picture in slow motion, like the kind they take of your dives—or am I seeing things?"